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Trivia: Originally, director Ridley Scott wanted "Alien" to have a much darker ending. His intention was to have the alien get back on board the shuttle, rip Ripley's head off and then calmly sit down in her chair and record the final transmission, speaking in her voice. The producers understandably found this a little too extreme, so Scott tried changing it to having Ripley go to sleep as normal only for the camera to pull back out of the airlock's window and reveal an alien egg, in the process of hatching, attached to the outside of the shuttle (after the "Brett/Dallas egg mutation" scene was deleted, this also had to go).

Trivia: Originally the design for the alien called for it to have pulsing brains in its head (the idea being so we could see the creature 'thinking' while it moved around). The effects department accomplished this by having live maggots placed underneath the transparent dome on the head. Unfortunately the maggots refused to wriggle and move around on command, so the effects dept. doused them with LSD right before the cameras started rolling. The idea was later scrapped.

Trivia: The Character of Lambert was actually born male, and had a sex change to become female. This is stated in the dossier that can be seen in the beginning of Aliens.

Trivia: When Kane encounters the alien eggs, some droplets of the dark liquid that covers them can be seen falling upwards instead of downwards. This is because the egg was in fact upside down when it was filmed and the shot was inverted to show the otherworldly nature of the eggs.

Trivia: For the wide shots where we see Kane and Co. walking around outside the Nostromo, Ridley Scott used children (two of which were his own) in special child sized space suits so the sets would appear bigger in comparison to the people on screen. He used the same tactic again when they discover the fossilised space jockey on the alien ship.

Trivia: Roger Ebert, in his original review, gave the film two out of four stars and called it "basically a haunted house thriller on a spaceship." Several decades later, he changed it to a 4-Star rating and put it on his "Great Movies" list. He did the same thing with "Groundhog Day."

Trivia: Jon Finch was originally cast to play the part of Kane, but had to drop out on the first day of filming due to a severe attack of diabetes.

Trivia: When Veronica Cartwright (Lambert) arrived at the studios in England to start working on the film she actually thought that she was to be playing the part of Ripley. It was a mistake by the film makers and quickly rectified.

Trivia: At the premiere of Alien, religious zealots set fire to the model of the alien, believing it to be the work of the devil.

Suggested correction:Myth. While this verbatim description of the vandalism that destroyed Giger's model is still bouncing around the Internet, blaming "religious zealots, " there is apparently no documented factual evidence to substantiate it. In fact, the only source for the "religious zealot" claim comes from David A. McIntee's 2005 book "Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to the Alien and Predator Films, " which has been criticized for too much opinion, bias and speculation, and too little documented fact. In actual documented accounts, the arson of Giger's models at the Egyptian Theatre is blamed simply on "vandals, " with no mention of motivation, religious or otherwise.

Trivia: The Alien itself has a total of only 4 minutes' screen time in the entire film.

Trivia: The original budget for Alien was supposed to be $4.2 million, but was then doubled to $8.4 million after Ridley Scott impressed 20th Century Fox with the storyboards he made.

Trivia: When the Android is attacking Officer Ripley, the first scene Ripley was sprayed with glycerine to give the idea they were sweating. However, the later scenes of the fight this glycerine was omitted because she found out she was allergic to it.

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In the shot of the alien's tail wrapping around the back of Lambert's legs right before it kills her, the floor is different to what it was before, there is water suddenly falling from the ceiling when there wasn't before and her trousers have changed from white to blue. This is because that shot was originally intended to be used when Brett was killed.